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Hello writers and readers!
I hope your season has been a good one. It’s the end of summer here in Los Angeles, but the heat is just ramping up. I hope you are staying safe in whatever extreme weather conditions you may be experiencing in your parts of the world!
It’s been a while since my last update, but a lot has been going on behind the scenes here.
The Background
As you know, a couple years ago we brought on our very first batch of slush readers to help us read through our steadily growing submissions queue, and we have continued bringing more readers on to help. At that time, we were receiving about 10 submissions per day. During our latest window earlier this year, we received the most submissions we ever had–over 500!–and at one point, our queue reached 43 submissions in a single day!
Here I must shout-out all of our lovely slush readers, past and present, as well as Grace, our submissions manager, Matt, our micro editor, and Caitlin, our assistant editor, for helping us swim through the slush pile! As I tell you all often, your time and efforts are very much appreciated, and we wouldn’t be able to run this magazine without you.
Receiving so many subs is exciting because it means our little magazine is making a name for itself in the literary community. But at the same time, it was daunting because we are a small team, even including all of our slush readers, and we weren’t sure if we could keep up with reading so many submissions and still maintain a healthy work-life balance.
So, over the past few months, I’ve been talking with Mel, Cerid, and the rest of our editorial team about what direction we want our magazine to take, how we can engage with our community of current readers as well as new readers, and how we can manage the amount of submissions we receive.
We talked about expanding The Metaworker by bringing on even more slush readers to get through all the submissions in a timely manner, but we realized that managing all the admin tasks and the increased reading demands had been taking a toll on all our team members. Adding more staff members would likely add stress instead of removing it. All of us here–editors, slush readers, and other volunteers–have busy lives and we run this magazine in our free time, which means we have to fit it in between life’s other demands.
It has always been important to me–and to us as a team–to maintain a healthy balance of work and fun here at The Metaworker. We also want to make sure we can keep doing our fun side projects–like our podcast and newsletter–and be able to engage more with our staff and with our authors.
The Update
So, after much consideration, we have decided to keep The Metaworker team small. Our current volunteers will still be working with us, but we’re not going to be expanding our team further any time soon.
Our magazine grew quite a bit faster than Mel, Cerid, and I were expecting, and instead of trying to play catch up with the rapid growth, we’re going to be intentional about where we are focusing our energy. Everyone on our team has had quite a lot going on in our personal lives this year, and we don’t want to add another element of stress if we can help it!
So, in sticking to our roots, we want to continue to maintain a laid-back atmosphere of creativity and community, and be a safe space for experimentation, where friends can get together to work on the fun passion project that is this magazine.
What this means for you, dear readers, is that we’ll have to find ways to balance the amount of submissions we accept. The obvious solution would be submission caps, but I would like to avoid this if possible because I feel that caps create barriers and limit accessibility to a smaller crowd, and I’d like to encourage a wide range of people to submit to us. So, we have decided to try something else first.
Since our beginning, as you know, we have had open calls for writing and art of any genre. Our next submission window opens on Sept 1, and true to our roots of trying new things, we’ve decided to limit the call to themes this time. We’re not sure yet if it’ll help with our goal of balancing the amount of submissions we receive, but that’s the joy of experimentation! We also think it’ll be fun to shake things up a bit by asking for themes that Mel, Cerid, and I are interested in.
Our inaugural themes are: “botany and alchemy” and “Inheritance: The things we get from the people who came before.” We have kept the themes open for interpretation because we’d like to see how these themes inspire you. Check out our submission guidelines for further details.
You also might see some changes to our publishing schedule. We used to publish only once a week on Mondays, but due to the volume of subs, we’ve been able to add Fridays as our second publication day. However, going forward, we’d like to keep our additional publication days flexible and we may not always publish twice a week. Or, on occasional Fridays we may feature other types of writing from our community such as book reviews, blog posts, thoughts on writing, excerpts from our writing sprints, etc.
Ultimately, we’d like to keep a steady pace here at The Metaworker so that we have the freedom to be creative and engage with you, our community.
I love running this magazine and I love reading the work you send us, and meeting all the creative people behind the writing and art we publish. You inspire me, and I’m so glad to be able to support you. I’m looking forward to reading your themed submissions this cycle!
Until next time,
Elena
